Living up to an Ivy League tradition?

Imagine a place where students can play squash with their suitemates, go to dinner with all of their closest friends and watch a screening of a movie in the theater -- all without having to leave their dorm.

At other Ivy League schools, such as Yale and Harvard universities, this notion of a self-sufficient community that combines academics, social programs and dorm life is a reality.

But for Penn, the image of a comprehensive living community has yet to resonate with many students, some of whom say the traditions of other Ivy League college house systems won't work at a large urban school like Penn.

At other Ivies, all of the residential houses are relatively equal in size and structure -- Columbia has 16 high rise facilities, each equipped with elevators, lounges, kitchens and recreational facilities, and Harvard University fairly evenly divides its undergraduates into the school's college houses.

With the induction of Penn's current college house system in 1998, University officials had hoped to create a group of residential dorms that would promote a sense of community within the individual houses and facilitate cooperation among the various dorms. The idea was to combine living, learning and playing.

In part, the University was responding to the success of its peer institutions in using their college house systems to recruit the nation's top students. To stay on top, Penn had to compete.

But three years later, students say the college house system has not created the close-knit community where residents interact with their neighbors on a regular basis that is found at some of Penn's Ivy peers.

College junior Katherine Sledge said her residence, Harnwell College House, does not foster a "real sense of community, and you don't really get to know your neighbors very well there."

Although schools such as Yale and Penn do not have the space necessary to house 100 percent of their undergraduates on campus, a significantly larger number of students at Yale call the dorm rooms, rather than apartments, home and meals become a jump downstairs with fellow house members rather than a prearranged meeting with friends or classmates.

Penn also is put at a disadvantage, when compared to its Ivy peers, by the sheer number of beds found on campus -- the proportionally smaller number of dormitories necessitates that at least one-third of students will have to rely on off-campus housing.

Penn's limitations, however, extend beyond a mere issue of space. The living arrangements of the different dorms, ranging from apartment-style rooms to traditional single dorm rooms, make it difficult to create a consistent sense of community across the University's 12 houses.

And when Stouffer Dining Hall was closed last summer in response to the shaky financial situation of Dining Services, Quadrangle residents were scattered throughout the University's three other dining halls, eroding the fusion of living and dining the college house system was hoping to achieve.

Although Penn lacks the ability to house its entire undergraduate population on campus, Director of College Houses and Academic Services David Brownlee said that even if the University had the resources to accomplish such a goal, it might not be an optimal decision.

"I think that it is the case that we have chosen not to build a university system where everyone lives on campus, even if we make room for a thousand more beds," he said. "One of the advantages of the University is that it is a campus integrated withing a city and having undergraduates live in the city is a central part of that goal."

But for Harrison College House resident Zuri Price, living in one of Penn's 12 college houses does not provide students with the ability to become well acquainted with one another given the large number of people living in the dorms.

"You don't get to know every person in the building or even on your floor," said Price, a College sophomore.

Price, who lived in Goldberg College House last year, said the dorm's graduate and resident advisers tried to foster a family-like atmosphere for the freshman residents, but said Harrison College House makes no effort to do so.

"In Goldberg, they tried to create a sense of community, and here they don't try as hard to make sure everybody gets to know each other," Price noted. "I think [the college house system] has its problems."

But Sledge has lived on campus for all three years at Penn and said the college house system does, in fact, foster a sense of community. Sledge said that Hill College House provided her with the best experience in comparison to the high rises, the trio of tall cement buildings located west of the heart of campus. Having spent a lot of time at Yale, where her father is a college house master, Sledge has seen how a college house system should work efficiently.

"It is really rare because there is no reason to transfer to the better dorm because they are all equal," Sledge said.

"I think Hill House is closest to that here, but it is still light years away."

For students at Yale, the college house system is far from diffuse.

The Yale system, created in 1931, incorporates 12 college houses, each with its own college master, dean, master's aids, residential advisers and student council.

Yale students identify themselves with their college house, rather than the division of the university in which they are enrolled. According to Sledge, each house acts as a team, where the students will spend three of their four undergraduate years.

Junior Emily Williams, president of Yale's Berkeley College House student council, said one of the advantages of Yale's system is that the wide array of facilities allows students to form close relationships with each other. Berkeley has everything from a half-court basketball gym to a woodshop to a game room.

"I think it is a really good way to know a large amount of people," Williams said. "We are able to meet a smaller portion of the students here, which I think is a big advantage."

William Sledge, Calhoun College House Master at Yale, said the benefits from such a system are not the result of living on campus, but an attribute to the success of the individual houses.

"The benefits are that they are more or less living in an intimate community in which you are well known by your classmates," he said. "The advantage is it is a system in which people get to know each other well and are supportive of one another yet you are at a relatively large University with a vast amount of resources."

But the current system at Penn suffers from the fact that the University did not originally equip the residential houses with adequate facilities, unlike Harvard, with 13 residential dining halls, which are accessible to all undergraduates.

Brownlee, recognizing this drawback, said the creation of more comprehensive facilities is something Penn is working toward.

"I think the largest single thing -- what we have been working on since the beginning -- is physical facilities. We started with a group of buildings that were not designed to do this," Brownlee said.

Both William Sledge and Brownlee said that a key to the success of any college house system is that the dining hall be in the same building as the dorm where students live and interact with each other on a daily basis.

But, after the loss of Stouffer and dispersal of Quad residents across campus, Penn currently has three dining halls for 12 different houses, with only two of them physically located within dorms. Brownlee said the incorporation of dining facilities into the college houses is a "highly desirable thing, and I think we have to raise our ability to do that."

Between the central location of the dorms on campus and the integration of the dining halls into the college houses, the majority of students at Yale choose to spend all four of their years in the same college house. According to Sledge, 87.5 percent of Yale undergraduates live on campus.

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